‘Cindy can have Sleepy Joe!’: Trump targets McCain’s widow after Biden endorsement

Cindy McCain previously expressed support for Biden during the Democratic National Convention last month — appearing in a video focused on the former vice president’s “unlikely friendship” with her husband, the longtime Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential nominee.

But McCain made her endorsement official Tuesday, tweeting that there is “only one candidate” in the presidential race “who stands up for our values as a nation.”

“Joe and I don’t always agree on the issues, and I know he and John certainly had some passionate arguments, but he is a good and honest man,” McCain wrote. “He will lead us with dignity.”

McCain also argued Biden “will be a commander in chief that the finest fighting force in the history of the world can depend on, because he knows what it is like to send a child off to fight.”

McCain’s husband, a former Navy pilot, spent roughly five-and-half years in a notorious North Vietnamese prison where he was repeatedly tortured and spent two years in solitary confinement.

Throughout his first presidential campaign and tenure in office, Trump has repeatedly disparaged the late senator, memorably insisting in 2015 that “he’s not a war hero” and remarking: “I like people who weren’t captured.”

Prior to Cindy McCain’s endorsement announcement Tuesday, Biden said at a virtual fundraiser that the late senator’s wife had decided to formally back him after The Atlantic and other news outlets reported earlier this month that Trump made numerous derogatory comments about U.S. service members and America’s war dead.

Biden’s late son Beau, a former Delaware attorney general and Iraq War veteran, died in 2015 from the same aggressive form of brain cancer that resulted in Sen. McCain’s death in 2018.

Cindy McCain is not the first widow of a prominent American military veteran to come under attack by the president.

Last December, Trump criticized Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) during a campaign rally in her home state, as the congresswoman voted to approve impeachment articles against the president charging him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Trump recounted to supporters how Dingell had called him last February following the death of her husband, former Rep. John Dingell — a World War II veteran and the longest-serving member of Congress.

The president claimed the congresswoman thanked him for the “A+ treatment” he provided by ordering all U.S. flags to fly at half-staff. The president went on to suggest that Dingell’s late husband was in hell.

Debbie Dingell later sought to clean up the president’s version of events, contending it was actually Trump who called her to say he would be lowering the flags. She also clarified that her husband did not lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda after Trump appeared to imply he had arranged a memorial for him there.